This also isn't a win for him, yet... It's getting remanded back to the appeals court (and possibly, eventually back to the trial court), and so his fight isn't over. On retrial, a jury could still convict him by finding that he actually did intend to threaten his ex when he sent her a facebook post saying that her restraining order wouldn't protect her from a bullet, rather than just that a reasonable person would interpret it to be a threat.

If they did that, the provisional application would never be published or open to public inspection, so it would be useless to prevent a troll from getting a patent on the same technology.

Looking at the people here calling for blood, do you think such an announcement would be taken without a grain of salt? There's nothing binding in an announcement.

They did file in the name of the actual inventors. If you click the links, they're by John Resig and Joel Burget.

That's not true at all. The only thing that "first to file" changes from "first to invent" is interference practices: previously, if Alice and Bob both filed patent applications for the same exact invention, they would go onto an interference, which is like a mini-litigation, to determine which of them actually conceived of the invention first. They cost between $20-50k for each party, and there were on average about 20 per year... out of over half a million patent applications filed each year. Under the new system, it's just a question of who filed their application first.

First to file has literally nothing to do with prior art. And prior art that was never patented absolutely matters - white papers, scientific journals, product literature, etc. can be and are all used as prior art, even under the first to file system.

Claim 1 has legal weight, unlike the abstract. You can tell it's a claim because it starts with a number, is a single sentence, and is in the section that starts "I claim" or "we claim" or "what is claimed is", rather than the section that says "Abstract".

Well, yes, most improvements in technologies draw inspiration from earlier technologies. The Tesla Roadster draws inspiration from the Model T. The Boeing Dreamliner draws inspiration from the P51 Mustang. Windows 10 draws inspiration from Microsoft Bob. The question isn't "was this inspired by something earlier" but "is this obvious in view of what came earlier?"

Also known as "published normally". Patent applications are typically published 18 months after their filing date. There's nothing "quiet" about it - it's included in the official gazette each Tuesday and Google Patents (among other services) take an image of it. But it's a nice attempt by Subby to imply that there's a dark conspiracy here.

This appears to be a reference to the 20-person pro bono committee at Wilson Sonsini. Most law firms have pro bono committees of partners in charge of selecting and approving pro bono work, which is then taken on by junior associates. The committee itself doesn't do the work, so no, they didn't have a "pro bono team of 20+". They probably had a supervising attorney, a patent agent, and a paralegal, donating probably around 50 hours total for the two applications.

They can also be filed before the public disclosure. They're inexpensive placeholders that you can file without paying fees for search and examination. If you don't file the nonprovisional application within one year, the provisional expires and disappears forever, so they're particularly a good thing for startups who don't have revenue yet.

That's the abstract of the patent. It has no legal weight and is only there to aid in searching through patents.

Yeah. That patent has no patent term adjustment, as I said.

Nothing, because those patents don't get patent term adjustment. And while, yes, there are still a few patent applications floating around from that era, that law was changed 20 years ago. It's already been taken care of for everything since then, and since you can't apply it retroactively, there's nothing more that can be done.

Except for the fact that that never, ever happens.
Seriously, find me a patent that has 19 years of patent term adjustment. Here's an article discussing how almost 100% of patents that get granted do so within 4 years, with the very longest outlier being 6 years.

Add to this the fact that the "good faith belief" is a really low bar, and simply means you found an amenable patent attorney to draft an invalidity opinion letter for you. If they're right, the patent is invalid and you owe nothing. If they're wrong - under the previous state of the law - you believed it was invalid and didn't intend to infringe and owe nothing.
Which basically boils down to, "pay an attorney $10k for an opinion memo, and get out of infringement scot free." It's a good loophole to close.

Disclaimer: I am a patent attorney and have done opinion letters. Mine were totally legit, though.

Probably not... as noted elsewhere, only the damages on the registered and unregistered trade dress were struck, while the damages on the patent infringement were upheld. The jury verdict form doesn't break down damages by patents vs. trade dress, but there were 7 patents that Samsung was found to infringe (5, willfully, which triples the damages); and there was only one trade dress registration and one unregistered trade dress that were shown to be protectable... and many of Samsung's devices were found to infringe the patents but not either of the trade dress claims, so it's not even going to be as big as a 2/9 reduction.

For example, take the Samsung Epic 4G, which the jury counted as $130.1M in damages. It infringed all but one of the patents, but wasn't found to infringe either the unregistered or registered trade dress. So this judgement won't reduce that award by a penny. Same thing for any of the Samsung Galaxy S II models other than the Showcase, which collectively are $250M.

First, from the article:

The article is confusing two things here... First is trade dress, which is part of trademark law and covers the look and feel of something. It's under the commerce clause of the Constitution, and is codified in the Lanham Act at 17 USC 1051-1127. Trade dress is also a common law doctrine (and some states, particularly the original colonies, have their own state trademark law), and accordingly, there is such a thing as unregistered trade dress rights (there are also registered trade dress rights).
Second is design patents, which are part of patent law and also cover the look and feel of something. It's under the patent clause of the Constitution, and is codified in the patent act (35 USC 100 onwards). There is no such thing as an unregistered design patent or a "trade dress patent".

Finally, neither trade dress nor design patents can cover functionality. They only apply to aesthetic features or "surface ornamentation".

"But wait, Theaetetus," some Slashdotters protest. "Rounded corners are always functional, because otherwise, you'd cut your fingers off on the sharp edge!"
That's true, and neither the trade dress nor the design patents cover the concept of rounding a corner... Instead, they cover this specific radius of curvature. Specifically, why would you choose rounding the corner? To avoid sharp edges. Why did you choose a 1/8" radius instead of a 1/6"? An arbitrary aesthetic design choice.

Moving on to the real point here...

The jury found that Samsung infringed the (i) unregistered trade dress, (ii) registered trade dress, and (iii) design patents. With regard to the first one, the unregistered trade dress, Apple has the burden of proving that it's nonfunctional. They failed to do that, because the design as a whole offered some utilitarian advantages. So the damages placed by the jury because of (i) should be struck.

Turning to (ii) the registered trade dress, this had nothing to do with rounded corners. The registered trade dress covered the 16 icons on the iPhone's home screen. The Court held that those icons have functional features, since they tell people whether they're clicking on email or a browser. So, since they're functional, the damages placed by the jury because of (ii) should also be struck.

That leaves us with (iii), the design patents. Here, however, the jury was instructed to disregard any functional elements and focus just on the aesthetics. And here, Samsung loses, because they can't show any error in that.

So, the jury award is reduced to just what is applicable to the patents, not the trade dress.

As an aside, the court also upheld the validity of Apple's utility patents over Samsung's objections. So this is a net loss for Samsung.

First, I don't believe that's correct. The DMCA doesn't seem to mention profit anywhere except in relation to whether something is a nonprofit institution of higher education.

Second, direct vs. indirect profits are when an infringer has both direct profits from the infringement (selling the infringing work) as well as indirect profits (add-on non-infringing sales of other works that may have been caused by the sale of the infringing work). For example, if I sell you pirated software plus a "service and warranty package", that's both direct profits and indirect profits.

That's a different pattern than GP was referring to, and wouldn't lead to the same negligence conclusion. Specifically, GP was saying "what if there are multiple legitimate takedown requests for 'Harry Potter by Al Alson', 'Harry Potter by Bob Bobson', 'Harry Potter by Charlie Charleson', 'Harry Potter by Dave Daveson', etc., each indicating infringement of the same work - Harry Potter by Rowling. Would that lead to a conclusion of negligence (or more accurately, willful blindness) by Google?"

Your response that you could send false takedown requests for many different legitimate works is a pattern, but not the same one. It would also lead to a conclusion that the seller was being harassed, rather than that the seller was a pirate and that Google knew or should have known that.

You're correct. The next step is to say "I've repeatedly asked if I am free to go, and you haven't answered. Unless you tell me otherwise, I'm going to assume that I'm not free to go and am being detained. I refuse to answer any other questions without my attorney present" or conversely, "I've repeatedly asked if I am free to go and you haven't answered. Unless you tell me otherwise, I'm going to assume that I am free to go and will be on my way." If they then say "stop", that's detention.

Yes and no... The Supreme Court held, 8-1, that even though stopping someone for a single broken tail light in North Carolina isn't legal, it's not unconstitutional, because it's reasonable for police to not know the law. :/